Photograph
by dustbunny
Summary: Vaughn's take on the nature of photographs.


Photograph_  
  
Disclaimer: None of the characters belong to me. Besides, everyone knows that Vaughn belongs to Sydney anyway.  
  
A/N: The bare bones were inspired in passing by Weezer's "Photograph," which remained pathetically flimsy until I realized that Vaughn actually does have a kind of involvement with photographic…things. A first, and therefore AU-ish attempt to get inside Vaughn's head. And as of now, I've officially repeated the word so many times it no longer makes sense.  
  
***  
  
He can remember the dry stale smoke of cigarettes mingling with the comforting familiarity of a worn leather jacket, a remnant of more careless days. He can detect echoes of a hearty laugh and remnants of a midwestern twang, cajoling and teasing and tender. If he tries, he can still see the crinkles around startlingly blue eyes, the lines around a mouth accustomed to smiling.  
  
His father died a week past his eighth birthday, and Vaughn thinks he forgot what he looked like a few months after that.  
  
It was an obscenely beautiful day when they buried his father, and his mother's hand was cold and dry as they watched faceless men in black suits with backs stiff with grief come up, one at a time, and pay their respects. He was a good friend, they said, solemnly and sincerely. A good husband, a good father. A good man. He clutched his mother's hand and blinked away tears when the sun reflected off the polished mahogany of the coffin, and when the priest tossed a handful of earth over the grave a bird burst into song overhead. One of the straight stiff men knelt down as if it hurt and put a hand on his shoulder briefly. The man didn't cry, but his sad smile looked like he was bleeding.  
  
On the way home he told his mother he wanted to have a funeral like that when he died, and the helplessness in her eyes would be echoed fifteen years later when her only son joined the CIA.  
  
Photographs of his father surrounded him when he was growing up. The elder Vaughn was on the walls, on the top of the piano, on the black-and-white snapshots kept on the nightstand, and as the days went by he became more unfamiliar to his son. Who would sometimes touch the glass of the frames, careful not to smudge it, overcome by a strange fascination for the image of this man that was his father, preserved flawlessly for a second of his life.  
  
Later, he would understand that the pictures were the only way he could make sure his father had existed.  
  
***  
  
His desk used to be cluttered with photographs of everyone and their dog, and even after Langley suggested that his dozens of pictures looked slightly unprofessional he kept one of Alice he'd taken on a damp spring morning. He liked coming into his office after a day straight out of a convoluted spy movie and looking at her face, knowing that she was waiting for him, tangible and reassuring and gloriously real.  
  
He still has that picture, and he knows precisely where it's buried in the back of his closet. It's more than symbolic and closer to vital for him, and he's content with knowing that it's there, knowing that for three years she was his anchor to reality. They talk, once in a while, and someday when everything seems beyond comprehension he might take it out again.  
  
As a general rule, he's not very good with faces. He's got something like body memory instead, an extraordinary talent for sensory perception, and he can name a person from the slight tilt of their head and the swagger of their walk. He can remember in excruciating detail the sweet scent of Alice's perfume, something baseless and drifting and carried as much on the wind as on her. He can still pick out her laugh from a formless mass of noise on the street, and for three years he would have gladly given some of that to be able to conjure up something more than sea-glass eyes and vaguely delicate features.  
  
When he took her picture off his desk, it was as much a gesture of finality as anything else.  
  
By then this girl had walked into his office, bloody and bruised and beautiful with the craziest story he'd ever heard, and he'd ignored the ridiculous hair and biting sarcasm for a panicked, breathless second. The hard slash of her jaw and sharp angles of her cheekbones, the curves of her throat and lips and the burning anger of liquid eyes seared into his mind, and she's become the most lucidly real person he's ever known. When he has time, he likes to mull over the irony.  
  
He wants her photograph on his desk, and he's almost accepted it as just another thing he's not allowed to have. Although hers is the one face he can picture with clarity, a photograph of Sydney would root her firmly into existence, would be his glance back to make sure that this Eurydice isn't some fantastical creature he dreamed up on a particularly insane afternoon. It would mean letting go of all vestiges of the illusion that his life and his job are in two separate spheres, but when it comes to her these things don't matter quite as much as they used to.  
  
He was thinking about her latest mission when he was shopping for Alice's Christmas present in an antique store a few months ago, and was in the process of paying for a hideously ugly porcelain vessel of some kind when he spotted something glinting from the back of a shelf. He reached for it automatically, drawn to it as a child is drawn to shiny things, and turned it over absently, his mind on big wistful doe eyes and the shared pain over a lost parent. Before he actually knew what he was doing the clerk had wrapped it up and he was on his way home, and his heart was pounding with the anticipation of seeing her face as she opened it.  
  
He figures that she likes to think that these spy games aren't going to be part of her life, that after this is all over she'll go back to living happily in a world without secrets and bullets and death around the corner. He knows better but doesn't have the heart to tell her, and he can still feel the overwhelming sense of satisfaction when she gasped with undisguised pleasure as she saw the frame.  
  
He knew she would have just the right picture for it.  
  
***  
  
There are times when he wakes up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat and breathing hard, because in his nightmares he can't remember her face.  
  
***  
  
_(03022002) jen@velvet-star.com 


End file.
